I finally caught up with The September Issue, R.J. Kutler‘s documentary about Anna Wintour and the making of Vogue‘s large, vital September issue, this time in 2007. I thought it was great. I loved seeing Anna Wintour–I have never met her, but she reminded me of some of the great editors that I worked for, a person whose insistence on quality was so strong and uncompromising that she is considered tough and unfair and monstrous by the less perceptive, less committed people around her. I thought the movie captured very well the enormous pressures that she alone at the magazine carries on her narrow shoulders–meeting with the designers, the advertisers, the retailers, her publishing colleagues, even as she captains this complex, creative enterprise called Vogue magazine, demanding not only that it
produce but lead, not only that it appear but that it astonish. I actually found her a sympathetic and approachable figure. I also loved the film’s depiction of Wintour’s relationship with Creative Director Grace Coddington (pictured left, with Wintour), which is often depicted as tense or testy, but which is clearly one of mutual respect and affection where the tension is a product not of ego (well, not altogether of ego) but of fierce commitments to slightly different imperatives (Coddington’s is to artistic vision, Wintour’s is to the overall success of the enterprise) that are usually but not always in sync. But the film was great–my stomach clenched, my heart raced, and I found myself wishing I had a magazine to go to work for.
I don’t know if Anna Wintour was on her best behavior during the filming of this documentary, but my favorite scene is where Anna learns that the photographer commissioned to produce the cover story images doesn’t obtain the settings Anna wanted in Paris. You can just see her seething, and yet I could feel her pain, having been in similar circumstances where the photographer didn’t do what I asked him or her to do. Like Roger Ebert said in his review, Anna personifies Vogue, and her approach to editing reminds me of Vince Lombardi’s quote “Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”